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For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Sometimes one viewing is all it takes, I'm moving this title immediately to my list of best films no one's ever heard of. Not so much for the story itself, but for the dialog and terrific nighttime street scenes of downtown Cat-tail with all those great marquees. I'll get to them in a minute. There's also some great era touches that you have to pay attention for, and if you do you'll be rewarded with a hefty dose of reality on how things were during a time gone by.One of those took place early in the story. Did you catch the gas station guy lamenting the fact of all those vehicles passing him by to get to Cat-tail, stopping only if they needed a bit of fuel to make it the rest of the way? One of the customers bought a PINT of gas for 6 CENTS!!! Even con-girl Skeeter (Betty Brewer) filled up her gas can for a wallet busting twelve cents so her folks could make it the rest of the way. Usually we don't see the good old days portrayed this way.Staying another minute at that gas station - how about Danny's response to Lola (Ann Sheridan) when she turns down his offer to wash the car - he's willing then to touch up her bumpers! You've got to wonder how the film makers got that one past the Code enforcers.Well there's a whole bunch of stuff like this going on, so much so it took me almost twice as long to watch the movie compared to it's hour and a half run time, what with all the re-winds and stopping to take notes for this review. There's one scene I actually had to replay four times to see if I got it right. It's toward the end of the picture when Steve Talbot (Ronald Reagan) tucks in the drunken Nick Garcos (George Tobias) for the night. After leaving the room and locking the door, Nick calls Steve's name, and when Steve turns to answer, they're in the same room together again! Check it out.Oh yeah, about the main drag in Cat-tail. Seeing as how they put this together, someone was pretty creative in naming the joints up and down the strip. You had places going by The Goons, Little Zombie, Jook Alley, Shook Shack, Muckeye's and Horsies Hot Shot. Sheridan's character did her 'juke girl' gig at Muckeye's, where it looked like a fair number of fellas were willing to touch up her bumpers. The fact that future President Reagan got to close out the story in a smooch with the 'oomph' girl shouldn't have come as a surprise considering all that went before.It surprises me then that the film doesn't score a bit higher on this board. Okay, it is a bit formulaic, and if presented as a Western it would probably classify as run of the mill. But with all the cool stuff going on, I guess it just struck me in a way that a lot of films coming out of the era fail to do. Or maybe it had to do with one of those good luck Jo-Mo's Willie Best was peddling. It sure did the trick for me.

OK, I'm pretty far down on the list of previous reviewers, but I just saw this last night (April 12, 2016) on TCM as the second of a Ronald Reagan-Ann Sheridan double-bill following their pairing in "King's Row." So, by now readers already know the plot about the adversarial relationship between farmers and exploitive fat-cat (in Cat-Tail) vegetable buyer. The credit roll inside a jukebox rendering and jazzy musical score is wildly misleading. (Don't change channels; keep watching.) This movie is a surprisingly gritty story. I'm not going to summarize the storyline. If you're reading the reviews, you know the story by now. Here's what I want to point out: THE SET. When characters walk along the honky-tonk, "good times" strip to relieve the harsh realities of their dreary existence, check the names of the saloons. Somebody at Warner Bros. has a lot of fun naming these places: Muckeye's, Little Zombie, Goons, etc. All in all, an enjoyable film. The best dialogue is (surprisingly) between Sheridan and multi-talented Richard Whorf. Yes,credibility is stretched very far in the plot.***SPOILER ALERT*** Reagan steals a very nice truck and never held accountable.(Come on, he would have been locked up in the Cat-Tail jail on the spot.) Later, however, he IS arrested for a murder with the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. This leads me to my biggest criticism: The characters act in a way that only serves the screenwriter's purpose - not their own characters.

Ann Sheridan is usually in more Comedy films. This is a rare one where she is doing drama and romance with Reagan. The main plot of the movie is about the struggle farmers were having getting enough for their produce from middle men. The tension leads to undesirable results.The film tries to paint the middle man as being way to lean on the amount he is paying the farmers. In the meantime Alan Hale Sr. as Yippee gets too confrontational with Henry Madden (Gene Lockhart). Steve Talbot (Reagan) befriends Yippee and tries to control his wild behavior and tries to be a peace make with all the conflict going. Of course things go awry and Yippee gets murdered. Reagan gets accused of it and Sheridan (Lola Mars) gets accused with him.All of this spirals out of control with Henry creating a mob problem that is much like a Western, only this one is set in a more modern day (1942) setting. Actually it is a fair film though the ending is a bit muddled. It does not measure up to King's Row, but it is good enough for a viewing as the support cast here is really good, and Reagan and Sheridan act very well together. Reagan is happily married to Jane Wyman at this point and it seems like there is a little spark between him and Sheridan, but it also feels like it is an arms length type of thing too.

***SPOILERS*** It's when Kansas farm boy Steve Talbot played by future US President of the United States and leader of the Free World Ronald "Dutch" Reagan hooked up with feisty redhead Florida Juke girl Lola Mears, Ann Sheridan, that things started to get hot and heavy in the little town of Cat's-Tail Florida where they both resided. It's there that big time produce mogul Henry "The Man" Madden, Gene Lockhart, had an iron grip on the farmers in exporting their tomato's beans and cabbage to the markets all over the state. In champion of the working class Steve seeing the pain and suffering that Madden is putting the local farmers through he gets involved with maverick tomato farmer Nick Garcos, George Tobias, in standing up to Madden's bulling and greedy, in him getting all the lettuce (money) and the farmers getting peanuts, tactics.It's when Nick & Steve are about to bring their crop of green beans to market up in Atlanta Georgia, out of Madden's reach, that Madden sends his goons lead by the violent but simple minded Cully, Howard De Silva, to stop his shipment of beans from getting there. With Steve preventing Madden and his goons from stopping the shipment he together with his partner Nick end up selling the prized green beans at a record price of $4.50 a crate resulting in something like a $15,000.00 profit. As for Steve's girlfriend Lola, a hot tomato herself, she in fact dumps him in order to get back to her true love being a Juke Girl at a local Atlanta saloon. But not after receiving her share of the cut, in the sale of green beans, of $3,800.00 from a grateful Nick.***SPOILERS*** Just when you think the movie is about to end on the up side things rally get wild with a drunken Nick trying to get back in the good graces, or bury the hatchet, with Madden that he gets into a drunken spat with him ending up getting his brains beat in, in self defense, by an outraged and terrified , in him getting killed himself, Madden. With all the evidence leading straight to both Steve & Lola a lynch mob is incited by the bird brained Cully to drag both Steve & Lola out of the county jail and hang them on the nearest tree. It's only when Steve's friends Danny & Yippee, Richard Whorf & Alan Hale, get Madden to confess his crime to the lynch mob that they not bothering to have him stand trail, and finding out his killing Nick was in self defense but not murder, lynched the terrified and defenseless man on the spot. Making Cully & Co. far worse criminals as well as murderers then the late Henry Madden ever was!